


Expert Witness

by tweedisgood



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes BBC Radio
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 22:13:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1527578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedisgood/pseuds/tweedisgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by a line in Bert Coules' BBC Radio adaptation of The Lion's Mane. Holmes is learning about bees, and:</p><p>"Sometimes I am convinced that they are learning far more about me than I am about them."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Expert Witness

“I believe those are my hives, sir, not to mention my land. And who might you be?”

The grey-headed figure unbent enough to show, through the haze of fine netting which hung over my face, a black coat fading to green, a lined face – kindly but shrewd – and a clerical collar.

“Cyril Peto, Rector of this parish. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr Sherlock Holmes.” He held up a finger instead of extending a handshake. “Although, if I might correct you on one small point, from the stand of ash on our left down to the cliff edge is glebe land and therefore, strictly speaking, _mine_ at least for the time being. The terrier is quite clear on that score.”

“I will move the hives, then.” I was still not certain whether to see him off or to hear him out, for he had the air of one who makes an opening gambit in a chess game with a view to a long contest.

“No need, no need, I assure you. They are in the exact spot they ought to be. You lack only one more thing to bring the art of apiculture to perfection, or as near to it as this fleeting world can offer. Your reputation as a master of mysteries is evidently not confined to the realm of human error and wickedness.”

He apparently meant it as a genuine compliment, not the whimsical, backhanded jibe I might, in London, have taken it to be. Whimsy is all very well as the atmosphere for a light opera: in real life, it is apt to pluck on the nerves.

“One more thing…which is?”

“I fear to tell you; I really do, Mr Holmes. Perhaps I may first lay out my credentials. I myself am a beekeeper of twenty years’ standing and winner at the Fulworth Village Show of the Sir Eustace Shipley Cup for Produce (any other category) for the last sixteen of those twenty years. Blind tasting, of course.”

Of course.

I had heard of him; my housekeeper swore by the parsonage honey as a cure-all for all kinds of minor ills. Nevertheless, I had come up to inspect the frames, and saw no reason to stop on his account. From a safe distance he watched me lift the top off the first hive and apply the smoker. A few bees, not sufficiently overcome, floated up in his direction and circled his head once or twice before drifting purposefully into the pasture beyond. I thought to bid him take care but his attention was no longer on me but on the insects, not out of any kind of fear but rather, intense concentration. He murmured something I couldn’t catch.

“Do my frames meet with your approval, Rector?”

He shook himself, as if recovering from a daydream.

“It is not my approval you need. I do not have to live in them.”

Accurate, though unnecessarily puckish. He reminded me of someone whom I shall not name, for the reader can easily guess, and the reminder stung. It had been several months since I had laid eyes on my friend. I remarked that I supposed the bees would vote with their feet, or at any rate their wings, if the accommodations were not to their liking. He hesitated, pressed both hands to his mouth – as he might have held his nose before jumping into a lake – and took his chance.

“They suggest you consider *not* keeping them apart from their Queen, or else they may indeed decide to desert you _en masse_.”

Whimsy after all, then. “I am aware of the controversy, Rector. I choose to proceed in the manner of a scientist – two with an excluder, two as control. Once I have results suggestive enough of a conclusion, I will convert all to one system.”

“Yet in your former occupation, would you not have questioned the witnesses, as well as observe them?”

“My current way of life is a distinct and deliberate departure. I have had enough of other people’s secrets and lies to last a lifetime, thank you.”

To say nothing of my own.

“Indeed. Bees cannot survive if they lie, Mr Holmes. What is to us a virtue, is to them an instinct towards the propagation of their species. The community is all, and they find the preoccupation of the human species with individuality the most baffling, yet fascinating, of all the differences between us. They form theories about all of us who keep close contact with the hive.”

One must, I supposed, humour the eccentric, especially if he is your neighbour and a possible source of expertise in a field in which one is a novice. 

“You will tell me next that they publish those theories by their peculiar dances on the comb.”

“Not at all. The dances have quite another purpose which I am not at liberty to disclose, having been sworn to secrecy. I daresay in a lifetime or so – a human lifetime, that is – observation will winkle it out. I know what they say about us because they speak to me. Or rather, we understand each other, for naturally they lack the vocal apparatus to reproduce human speech.”

One must humour the eccentric - up to a point. The completely deluded is another matter altogether. A dozen cutting ripostes leapt to mind, but the only word that escaped my lips was a dry:

“Naturally.”

I slid the last frame home with that extreme care which can stand for an explosive gesture, and replaced the lid by way of a smothered exclamation mark. Then I turned away and started off down the path back to my cottage, having neither time nor inclination to engage in his absurd fancies.

“Sir, they beg you at least examine the end hive. Her Majesty is nearing the end of her reign; a successor will soon emerge.”

The whole thing was preposterous to my rational mind, but unconscious instinct nagged at me. What harm? If he was wrong, I need take no further notice. If he was right, I should put it down to his greater experience, to some trifle he had seen that gave him the clue and need not accept his version of how he came to know.

“I did not say it to convince you,” said the Reverend Peto, after I had found the situation in the end hive just as he had claimed the bees had told him it was, and was standing there working out how best to get rid of him without fuss. “The bees are not our unthinking slaves, as they know you have sometimes feared, but willing partners in a joint enterprise. In return for our protection they graciously allow us use of their surplus and make our fruit and flowers fertile. It is in all our interests to work in the closest harmony, and shared confidences, I have found, create the most perfect harmony. They want to know more about you, Mr Holmes. You do not have my gift, but fortunately that does not matter. Long association with humanity has made them the best of listeners.”

“You propose that I should _talk_ to my bees?”

He nodded, with a beatific smile that was, somehow, not at all insane or idiotic.

“Pascal was willing to wager far more on an essentially unprovable proposition concerning the very existence of the Deity. Really, Mr Holmes, what have you to lose?”

_My self-respect, for one thing._

“I was an only child of elderly parents who spent most of the year in India. Individuality is the mark of man; loneliness is his curse. The voice of the bees, since I first heard it and was first chastised for saying so, and the consciousness of their society were the greatest solace to me as a solitary child, and continues now, as a bachelor who grows old alone. It may prove so to you.”

“You, sir, are-"

“Impertinent. Yes, indeed. Spanked for it many a time and not yet cured, I’m sorry to say. Only try it, Mr Holmes, some afternoon or evening when you are quite out of human earshot, here on the top field. They tell me that you should dance for your nest-mate, with whom you once shared a corner of a great brick barn in a village without enough flowers to go round. They met him once, and he is good for you. You are like the solitary bee who cleaves to other solitaries: needing and yet not needing, not as they need each other. They do not really understand friendship, though I have done my best to explain. Perhaps you will do better, having a better model.”

With that, he tipped his hat and bade me good afternoon.

It was not, in the event, a good afternoon. I spent it in my laboratory, amid the consolations of hard science, of immutable chemical reactions which remained the same so long as I administered the same tests, which did not, could not, ‘speak’ to me nor hear. I told myself that the old man’s brains were addled by superstition and wishful thinking. It needed no secret communication for him to know that if Watson had ever been here, I would have taken him to see my hives. He could not know how seldom the doctor had visited, true: but I already had such a reputation in the district for shunning society and refusing overtures of friendship that any charlatan ‘medium’ might have read it the same way.

Therefore, it was all nonsense. It was, and the fact that the image of thousands of silent confidants kept knocking on the door of my brain attic, begging admission, whispering _no-one would ever know, Sherlock_ , was proof only of how dangerous sentiment was. For it was surely no more than sentiment – weak, useless, corrupting – that kept me returning to the subject of John H. Watson, MD. That tempted me to wire and ask him to visit, instead of waiting for him to write to me. That asked whether, in his new life, he still gave an un-reminded thought to a retired detective beyond the adventures we once shared.

Watson would write, or he would not. Wishing was futility.

It was all my thought of the evening, right up to the hour of retiring to bed. Sentiment, avoid sentiment at all costs. Even if the alternative is stiff-necked pride. Yet my dreams – my dreams were of a firm handclasp, the soft cough before the gentle enquiry or the loving rebuke, the halting step, the unfaltering courage. Near midnight I woke with a start, swore like a sailor and dressed haphazardly before lurching down the narrow staircase and snatching a blank telegram form from between the pages of “Highways and Byways in Sussex” in order to jack-knife it to the mantelpiece.

Then, before I thought better of it, I wrapped myself in a blanket, lit a lantern and walked up to the top field.

“You want to know about friendship, do you?”

The bees’ soft humming rose to a pitch like a hanging note before a coda, inviting me to contribute my part in the arrangement. I sat cross-legged on the grass and tucked the blanket under me. This must take some time to do properly, as it must if I am fool enough to do it at all. Where to begin?

“It is a gift undeserved. A man decides in favour of another, even as you decide which cells to feed and which to ignore. Royal jelly, not to make a Queen but to make a life as rich as any man has a right to. Even a solitary bee like myself. It is more than association, more than rank, more than role. It always has a name and mine… my friendship is called John.”

END

**Author's Note:**

> Check out the lovely companion picture fic by mazaher on Livejournal:
> 
> http://mazaher.livejournal.com/81405.html
> 
> Beta thanks to mazaher and dedicated to the BBC Radio Holmes listenalongers.


End file.
